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Hastings Alumni Mag-Spring 2013

“We have to start
doing what works.”
—Jorgio Castro
“I wasn’t in school, and I wasn’t working, so
I didn’t have insurance,” he says. “It was pretty
intense being sick and seeing how much of a challenge
it was to get health care.”
That experience, coupled with extreme difficulty
coordinating his mother’s health care needs,
motivated him to go to law school and find a way
to work in health care policy.
After internships with an Indiana congressional
representative and California Assemblywoman
Fiona Ma, Castro enrolled at UC Hastings. He
looks forward to classes in the health sciences
concentration. His intention is to one day apply
evidence-based methods to public health policy.
He wants to help people who live in low-income
neighborhoods like the one he grew up in and
ensure our health care system covers everyone.
“We have to start doing what works,” he says.
Jorgio castro ’15
Growing up in San Francisco’s tough Tenderloin
neighborhood gave Jorgio Castro a daily lesson in
how people’s lives are hurt by inequities in housing,
education, and access to decent health care.
His parents were immigrants—his father from
Bolivia and his mother from the Philippines—who
struggled to survive on his father’s hotel bellman’s
salary. Castro’s home for his first 16 years was a
rent-controlled studio apartment on Geary Street.
Walking to school meant passing by prostitutes,
drug dealers, and drunks—and started him thinking
about the circumstances that landed them there.
As an undergraduate, he endured the stress of
living without health insurance when a debilitating
muscle condition forced him to take two years’
leave from college.
8 spring 2013